Climate Change

As the UN climate conference was starting in Lima, Typhoon Hagupit (Ruby) was about to make landfall in the Philippines. Over 1 million people headed for shelters, with memories of Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) one year earlier clear in their minds. This short movie tells the story of the 2013 storm and the importance of resilience.

The Paris negotiations where the world will be writing a new international climate agreement are just a year away, and here in Lima, delegates from around the world are discussing their national commitments and contributions that will largely determine the level of ambition in that 2015 deal.

As we trace the path to a resilient and decarbonized economy, we must keep in mind that the Paris agreement will set a framework for the period post-2020. What happens until then?

The science tells us that, even with very ambitious mitigation action, we have already locked-in warming close to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Climate change impacts such as heat-waves, droughts, storms, and other weather extremes may be unavoidable.

By Nicolette Bartlett, Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group and CISL

Developing effective carbon pricing mechanisms can and will play a key part in tackling climate change, facilitating the much needed investment cost-effectively and at scale. Specifically, “cap and trade” policies or emissions trading schemes (ETS) have been widely adopted in recent years because of their potential to foster greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

One Brazilian business group that CLG has been partnering with is taking a novel approach. Empresas Pelo Clima (EPC) implemented an ETS Simulation using live corporate data to engage Brazilian companies in discussions around what a robust cap and trade market might entail and how it could be designed and implemented. The ETS Simulation is delivered in partnership between the Rio de Janeiro Green Stock Exchange (BVRio – Bolsa Verde do Rio de Janeiro) and EPC through the Center for Sustainability Studies of the Business Management School at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV-EASP).

A discussion on carbon pricing at COP20 brought together executives from Unilever, pension fund AP4, and the BVRio Environmental Exchange, and officials from California, South Korea, and the World Bank Group. Carlos Molina/World Bank

​We’re doing a lot of talking and listening here at COP 20 in Lima about climate finance – how hundreds of billions of dollars were invested globally last year to clean up the air, get efficient energy to more people, make agriculture more productive, and build resilience to extreme weather events.

We all know and acknowledge much more still needs to be done – the International Energy Agency and others believe we need at least $1 trillion dollars of new investment each year to address climate change.

There’s no way that public money alone can meet that goal. We need to find ways to catalyze the limited public funds we have to unlock private investment. That, of course, means investors need to have the confidence that the right policies are in place to make long-term investments for the climate.

The high-level segment of the UN climate talks is starting here in Lima. It's a different mood today than in previous climate talks and a different conversation, with both a sense of urgency and clarity of objective. There has been a lot of discussion around carbon pricing, in particular, with representatives from countries, cities, states and industry saying the question now is how quickly we can move.

Mats Andersson, CEO of Swedish pension fund AP4, spoke at the World Bank Group about the importance of transparency for investors and the impact of a carbon price in shifting investment to cleaner, more sustainable development.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tells us that to rein in climate change and keep global warming under 2°C, we will have to start reducing emissions now and get to near net zero emissions within this century.

That won’t happen without healthy forests and soil storing carbon, and it won’t happen without climate-smart land-use practices that can keep carbon in the ground.

Together, agriculture, forestry and other land use changes account for about a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The sector can be a powerful source of emissions, but it is also a powerful carbon sink that can absorb carbon dioxide, providing a pathway to negative emissions. The IPCC authors estimate that with both supply-side and demand-side mitigation efforts – including reducing deforestation, protecting natural forests, restoring and planting forests, improving rice-growing techniques and other climate-smart agriculture methods, changing diets, and reducing the immense amount of global food waste – we can effectively reduce a large percentage of emissions from the sector and increase carbon storage to move the needle toward net zero.

Over the next few months, governments worldwide will be preparing their national contributions to our collective need to combat climate change. These plans will form the foundation of a new international climate agreement to be agreed in Paris in one year’s time. Collective ambition matters now more than ever. We all have a responsibility to make the choices that will lower the risks created by decades of greenhouse gas emissions and usher in an era of job-rich, more-inclusive, cleaner economic development.

Scientists have provided us with a remarkable consensus. We believe that with this evidence, we have the strong foundation for action. That’s good news, because climate action has to scale up now.

This week and next at the UN climate negotiations in Lima (COP20), there is a sense that gridlock may be easing. The U.S. and China – the world's two largest emitters – set a strong pace last month when Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping stood together and jointly announced their top-line commitments for cutting emissions. Their pledges, along with commitments from the European Union and donor support for the Green Climate Fund, auger well for the Lima talks. But this was always billed as the finance COP, and how we finance the transition to deep decarbonization and lasting resilience requires a coming together that has eluded us to date.

The past five weeks have given us what may be defining moments on the road to a Paris agreement that will lay a foundation for a future climate regime.

On October 23, European Union leaders committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 and increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use by at least 27 percent by 2030.

On November 12, during the APEC Summit in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping and United States President Barack Obama jointly announced their post-2020 climate mitigation targets: China intends to achieve peak CO2 emissions around 2030, with best efforts to peak as early as possible, and increase its non-fossil fuel share of all energy to 20 percent by 2030; and the U.S. agreed to cut emissions by 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

On November 20, at the donor conference in Berlin, led by the U.S., Germany, and others, donors pledged about US$9.3 billion to the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

China’s announcement in particular is considered by many to be a game changer. China, the world’s biggest emitter with its emissions accounting for more than 27 percent of the global emissions, is setting an example for other major developing countries to put forward quantifiable emission targets. The announcement will hopefully also brush away the “China excuse,” used by some developed countries that have avoided commitments on the grounds that China was not part of action under the Kyoto targets.

Three articles in the news this week reinforce the messages in our report and shed further light on the answer to her question. A pair of research papers point out that black carbon and ground-level ozone – air pollution associated with so-called short-lived climate pollutants, or SLCPs – are already reducing Indian agricultural yields by up to half, and that coal-fired power – a large source of air pollution including CO2 – is costing China 670,000 deaths each year. These are both prime examples of local development issues that present climate-smart investment choices. As governments search for solutions to their health and agriculture problems that are exacerbated by air pollution, they have two options: invest in smoke stack controls and other interventions that eliminate the air pollution causing crop loss and mortality, but keep churning out CO2, or invest in alternative energy sources and efficiency measures that will also reduce both forms of climate pollution.

​​The fundamental inequality that exists between emitters of carbon and the victims of its devastating byproduct requires global cooperation and intervention beyond our willingness to act thus far. Today, we have the necessary technology, ingenuity and global monetary tools to incentivize a shift to cleaner energy.

Placing a price on carbon enhances the competitive position of renewable energy technologies, such as utility-scale solar, relative to fossil energy, thus encouraging migration away from high-carbon fuels. It is an important step, and it can be supported with other initiatives to ensure accountability.

In the private sector, transparency regarding carbon emissions is essential. With the advent of the Internet and the plethora of information available today, it is not only possible, but imperative that emitters of carbon are held accountable in a public forum.